RetributionArc Interlude: Silent Friend
by Nemi
Summary: Making it NC-17 just in case. This is a semi sequel to 'A Killing Love, A Healing Love.' Angsty. Zero's POV.
1. The Here and Now

Megaman does not belong to me, nothing belongs to me, in fact only own parts of this story.  
  
This is a sequel (yes, a, not the, there has been a real sequel in the works since the first one came out) to A Killing Love, A Healing Love.  
  
Oh and beware, rape and nastiness will be abound  
  
Consider it in response to the reviews saying Zero fell apart too quickly.  
  
  
  
Silent Friend  
  
Agape. A-ga-pay, not A-gape. At least that's how I think it's pronounced. And that's what I'm calling you, Agape.  
  
It's Latin you know, it's one of the words for love.  
  
It is unconditional love. It is a love that doesn't care who or what you are, you could be the sickest, most depraved person in the world and still have that love. It is a love that God is supposed to have for his children, a gift he gives them.  
  
I don't know if Repliods constitute as such, but if I felt anything at all for Him, that is the word that best fits it.  
  
I'm calling you this because I think it's what I need. I hurt, I hurt so much, and I still love him. It is agony.  
  
...  
  
Some people think I'm being weak, or perhaps over reacting, after all, humans recover emotionally and physically from it, why can't I, the great Maverick Hunter, bounce back a bit faster instead of sinking deeper?  
  
...  
  
I've heard whispers. The whispers silence when I am near, worse so are the ones that don't.  
  
The whispers say that it is my fault. Perhaps I invited it, or even enjoyed it.  
  
They say that I deserved it.  
  
But He screams at them, He confronts them because I am too cowardly, He punishes them, He protects me.  
  
He says that it wasn't my fault.  
  
He says that what they say isn't true, and that I shouldn't listen to them.  
  
He says that no one deserves it, least of all me.  
  
He says he loves me.  
  
I had almost believed him until he said that. I want to believe it, but I can't. I need to believe it but it is impossible.  
  
And that is why I sink, why I go deeper and deeper into darkness and depression. I surfaced briefly when he came back to me, when he was mine, but now I slowly submerge.  
  
Humans have friends, have family, have moral support.  
  
He was the only one I had, and I lost that.  
  
He was me Brother, He was my Father, He was my Son, He was my Lover.  
  
He is my Jail keeper.  
  
He is my Torturer.  
  
He is my Defiler.  
  
My Rapist, My Love.  
  
He Owned me before he ever lifted a hand against me. I freely gave my soul to Him.  
  
I feel cold inside. I feel hollow with the cold north wind blowing though and rattling little things inside my hollow shell.  
  
That is why I call you Agape, for I am a gape, my wound still open needing, something to fill it.  
  
It could very easily be hate. But I want it to be love again.  
  
So my dear journal, my mirror self, my silent friend, you are the only one I can talk to. You will guard my secrets.  
  
--Zero 


	2. Past Hurts and Sweet memories

AN: X has always struck me as a bit of a political being. I mean would you let someone make your children if you knew they were going to be slaves? Hell No! So he went over to the political arena and fought for Reploid rights. Then he got rather proactive in X1.  
  
  
  
Silent Friend  
  
  
  
Their words hurt me Agape, they hurt more because the words are not old ones.  
  
Long ago He brought be to the Hunters, and sponsored me for entrance. "Who ever heard of a reploid with amnesia," they asked. Then half of them said that I asked a favor of Him and was faking my amnesia, or perhaps I was a bastard and my maker hated me so much that he had erased my memories of him.  
  
The other half said that He was only sponsoring the "girly-bot" so he could have me when ever he wanted.  
  
Even when I made it, and everyone had to agree I was skilled, there were whispers, "Of course he's skilled. The Commander wouldn't go for a klutz no matter how pretty they are."  
  
But I showed them up, I cleaned out a Maverick nest by myself, I was a hero, second only to Him. Then they praised me, then I had friends.  
  
I learned how to look heroic, how to project self confidence and all that crap.  
  
But they weren't my friends.  
  
Only He was.  
  
I looked up to him ever since I first heard about him, the first Reploid. I could fight, I could kill, but He fought with words, He made it so we could live. Mavericks said that Reploids were treated like second class citizens, and they were correct at times. But He made sure we could be citizens in the first place.  
  
What was the point of fighting for humans if we were nothing to them? I realize that it's a rather Maverick thought, but I can't help what I think.  
  
And the fact that they can't strap me to a table and pry though my files and destroy me for having that thought is something I, all of us, have Him to thank.  
  
I realized early on there was no point in me fighting if he wasn't fighting for us. I devoted my life to doing what little I could to protect him even though we had never met. I became second only to Him, perhaps even a better, I took assignments that were near where he lived, not trusting others to get all the Mavericks. Mavericks who, according to intelligence, had plans to assassinate Him I enjoyed killing immensely. To be sure I wasn't the only one who did this, it was actually rather common, but I was the most powerful fighter who felt this way.  
  
Then I met Him. He had just joined the Hunters, perhaps He was getting flack for preaching and not being proactive or somesuch. I really don't know.  
  
At first I sent him to clean up Mavericks in as low a risk zone as you could get during a war. I neither wanted to insult him nor put him in danger. I hadn't realized how dangerous it was and cursed myself for it, but I did manage to save him from Vile.  
  
I don't know how He did it, but He became my friend.  
  
My only friend, not those hanger-ons, or fan girls or anything like that, but a friend, and someone I could depend on, more so when He came back from increasingly more difficult missions.  
  
I started to...cling, to him. Not physically mind you, but emotionally. Perhaps it was unhealthy, but I don't think so. So many Reploids go Maverick because they have no one to care for them, off an assembly line, sold like so much meat and with no family at all. Or sometimes because humans treat them like crap. But I had Him, and He reaffirmed my belief in the inherent goodness of the human and Reploid races.  
  
I gave my life to save Him from Vile. I would have done that for what he did for us, as I was prepared to do before I even met him.  
  
For being my friend...  
  
Right now I want to write something poetic and selfless like, "I could give up my life with a smile." But that's bullshit. No one can go to death with a smile unless their lives suck as much as mine does or if they are fucking psychotic like /Him./  
  
But...Without even the thought I could be brought back to life--I could go with satisfaction. I had fought for what I believed in, I had been Great, and I had a friend whom I was protecting.  
  
--Zero 


	3. Arete

Sometimes I dream.  
  
I take that back, I always dream, all reploids do, if we didn't we'd go nuts like humans with sleep deprivation.  
  
I know that I'm already nuts, but at least I don't see bugs crawling up my body, yet.  
  
But sometimes I dream, not remember, that would be like a video rewound and played again. Sometimes I dream, and my nightmares are new horrors.  
  
I Dream of Him. Sometimes it is his true face, scared and blank blue eyes, some times it is His face, as he was when he hurt me. Some times his eyes are His.  
  
And he hurts me again, and it is real to me.  
  
I feel dirty when that happens, though I bare no outer marks from what happens in my mind I can still feel the blood.  
  
So I take titanium X wool, take a real water shower and scrub myself until I do bleed.  
  
The blood washes it all away. I tilt my head up to the shower head and close my eyes, my hair hanging from my flung back arms in thick strands, and I imagine that it's blood.  
  
My blood, his blood. But never His blood, or the blood of innocents. Innocent blood leaves marks on your hands and body, stains you when it and your virtue leave you, tainted blood purifies.  
  
I am not saying I was pure when IT happened, but...I was not as I am.  
  
I have been reading. Even now in this time when people can be made and not born people turn to religion for hope and certainty. Out of hope or perhaps I was willing to try anything, to recover or to at least escape everyone around me, I visited a church, my hair hidden under a trench coat. Even if I did not believe there are places that feel serene because the people in there find serenity in them. I told not my name nor that I was troubled. I may not share the faith but that priest was a good man and knew I was troubled.  
  
He was a good man, but told me false things, how could THIS get better eventually? He said that if it was as bad as I seemed to think it was I could only go up. Wrong again, I can go sideways. He knew I wasn't Christian but said I should read the bible and find Jesus.  
  
Even if I did I don't think Jesus would accept a machine shaped like a man made to kill things and likes other machines shaped like men.  
  
But I dug up some old, some of the oldest I could find, files and read them, thinking perhaps translating the damn things would take my mind off of reality, as they wouldn't let me do paper work for fear of upsetting me.  
  
Despite myself I found it interesting, a few of the stories, but mostly on how language has changed and been altered, and I felt some kinship with some of the women in the stories as they were treated horribly.  
  
Like Leviticus was the one that said a man should not lay down with a man as he does a women. But in that time your dog was considered more valuable than your wife at the time, so it was up to interpretation if he meant sex or treating men like animals.  
  
I was his dog, he held a knife to my throat and cut a line along my jaw, peeling away the skin until I barked for him.  
  
....I have to dream about it, I'm not going to write about it too, I don't want to.  
  
...  
  
Arete, Ara-teh, like 'era' only with an 'a', and the 'teh' is short, not like tete, that's Greek, it means excellence or virtue, or virtue as in "by virtue of." It was used to describe what you were good at. A rickety chair had very little virtue at being a chair, very little arete.. In earlier forms of the bible they used that word to describe Christ, "And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him" (Mark 5:34)  
  
My virtue at being a Hunter, at being me flowed out when He hurt me. I truly fit my name now.  
  
I look back on my thoughts and entries, and I realize that sometimes I can't differentiate whom I was writing or thinking of. In my mind, just as in my dreams, they share and trade eyes.  
  
...  
  
When I held him when He came back to me, when I touched his clothes virtue flowed back into me.  
  
I have not touched him since.  
  
--Zero  
  
  
...  
  
Mark 5:25-34: "And a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years, And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse, When she had heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and touched his garment. For she said, If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole. And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague. And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes? And his disciples said unto him, Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me? And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing. But the woman fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth. And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague." 


End file.
